


(A Scar Means) The Hurt is Over

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [167]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Affection, Aftermath of Torture, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Comfort, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Good Loki (Marvel), Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Loki (Marvel) Has Issues, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Love, M/M, POV Loki (Marvel), Past Abuse, Past Torture, Scars, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:21:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28375335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: A peaceful night at home drags up old memories when your fingers find the edges of a scar from a lifetime ago. (TW: Memories of past torture, memories of suicidal ideation. These are not in-depth or romanticized, but they are mentioned. Please avoid this fic if that is going to hurt you.)
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [167]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 7
Kudos: 125





	(A Scar Means) The Hurt is Over

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, **Loki remembers short periods of time in his life where he considered suicide.** I don't get much more detailed than that, but he does remember it. Please avoid this fic if that's going to give you problems.
> 
> Last week, I saw a lot of posts on Tumblr where Loki's in chains in front of Odin and I am just dumb enough to feel sad and hurt by that scene, so I decided to write a fic wherein shackles like that caused some kind of physical damage and Loki's love finally notices the scars. This isn't wish-fulfillment at all, nope nope nope.

He rather liked it when you knelt before him. 

Perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but he thought that he’d grown out of that sort of thing. He’d survived that phase of his life, but only barely, and now that he was past it, he mostly tried not to think about it. 

But tonight, he was there on the sofa in your living room, and you were there on your knees before him, resting your head in his lap. You liked it when he read to you. You never came right out and asked him to do it—likely you were still too caught up in your silly concerns about bothering him—but it was impossible to miss the way your eyes would flutter closed as soon as he read the first line aloud. Your contented sighs were like tiny gifts to him. He’d never once thought to imagine that he could make any living being sound anything like that, but he did. You rubbed your cheek against his knee and reached to take his hand.

He didn’t quite understand your fascination with his hands, but he appreciated it all the same. Often, in the mornings, he would wake to the ticklish feeling of you trailing your fingertips along the back of his hand. Along his palm. Along his fingertips. He liked to lie still and watch you. You studied every last inch of his skin and gently bent his fingers so you could watch the way his muscles and tendons moved. Your face always looked so serious, with just the slightest hint of dreaminess in your eyes. It made him long to rush forward and sweep you into a kiss.

Tonight was no different. His eyes kept drifting up towards you, away from the pages of his book. You squeezed his hand gently, massaging his knuckles. It felt nice. It _always_ felt nice. Your fingers were certain and warm as you eased aches that he’d never once acknowledged. He’d escaped from the Titan with his life, of course, but his body was never quite the same again. So, without ever once being asked, you sought out the places that hurt and you soothed the pain—and, what’s more, you did it without ever once giving the impression that you knew how precious a gift you were giving him. 

After a while, you pressed your palm against his as though to compare the sizes of your hands. He rather liked that, too. You were strong and determined and as formidable an opponent as nearly any other Midgardian, but seeing how small your hands were compared to his always made a strange thrill run through him. Everything about you was softer than he was. Your body concealed your strength and the fire that ran in your blood. Seeing how easily his hands dwarfed yours, how easily he could envelop your hands in his own, it made him feel as though he could protect you. You didn’t _need_ anybody to look after you, but often you allowed him to do it anyway.

Perhaps it was unfair, but he took advantage of your quiet, dreamy state to slip his fingers between yours so he could pull your hand up to his lips. You made a quiet sound of protest, but did not pull away. You let him kiss you. You delighted in it. When you lifted your gaze to meet his, a shy smile curled your lips. 

“You _are_ listening, aren’t you?” He kept his voice deceptively stern as he spoke—but the way that your smile widened assured him that you heard what he was not saying. “I’m not reading aloud to an empty room, am I?”

You shook your head solemnly and pulled your hand back down into his lap so you could trail your fingertips around his knuckles. “I’m listening, Loki. You know I’ll always listen to you.” 

And he did. You were a stubborn thing—too stubborn by far for your own good—and so you rarely followed any of the so-called commands that he tried to give you, but you listened to him. When he spoke to you, whether he was reading or recounting a story or merely telling you how he’d kept himself entertained while you worked all day, you listened with rapt attention. It was almost unsettling at first. No one had ever listened to him the way you did. No one. 

He made the mistake, once, of speaking that thought aloud to you, and he still remembered the way anger had clouded your features. 

That was often how you responded when he spoke of his time in Asgard. Before you, he’d never thought twice about his childhood. It was normal for the second prince to feel cast aside, ignored, belittled. It was merely part of who he was. But even now, he would sometimes let slip some detail that he’d never thought twice about and you would throw your arms around him and apologize to him so sweetly even as the storm clouds gathered in your eyes. That was really the only time he ever saw you truly angry. You got so angry—not _with_ him, but _for_ him. Angry on his behalf. It was strange and new and precious.

There was so much that he wanted to say to you, tonight, but instead, he went back to reading. Sometimes you made it hard for him to figure out how to put his words in the correct order. That should have been alarming. His younger self would have loathed you for it, and avoided you in hopes of keeping his head clear, but now he wasn’t sure he’d trade it for anything. As he continued to read aloud to you, he became aware of your fingers tracing familiar patterns against his skin. His scars. His hands were littered with tiny, faded scars of a long lifetime of training for battle. They were old enough now that he’d more or less forgotten all about them, but your keen eyes were always quick to pick them out against his skin. 

You hated his scars. He knew that. When he slept shirtless beside you, he would sometimes wake up in the morning to that same gentle touch tracing the deeper, darker scars that marked his back and sides. He hated the heaviness in your voice when you bade him good morning on those days. He could hear traces of the horrors that flickered across your mind, and that was almost bad enough to make him tell you the actual stories of his scars, if only to keep you from imagining anything worse. The marks on his hands, though, they were small enough, and pale enough, that sadness rarely crept into your eyes when you touched him there, and so he let you.

The book he was reading was not particularly romantic. In fact, the segment that he was currently reading to you was almost frustratingly dull. Humans did so like their exposition, though, and he often had to remind himself that these books were written for humans, not for him. Still, when his mind wandered, he looked at your face, and the softness of your features, and he felt a newly-familiar warmth in his chest. Did you know the power you had over him? How could you _not_?

Gently, you turned his free hand over to expose the underside of his wrist and trailed your fingers up along his arm. It was hard to resist the urge to close his eyes, to tilt his head backwards and just enjoy the sensations that accompanied your touch, but he did. He liked to touch your skin like this because it always made goosebumps erupt in the wake of his fingertips. Tonight, he could feel the same thing happening in response to your touch. Pleasant chills coursed through his body. Was this how he made you feel?

But then you stopped. He felt you trace a straight line along his wrist, then follow the same line backwards. You said his name in a low voice, a worried voice. When he looked at your face, your brow was tight. 

“What is this?”

You’d found a new old scar, one he’d definitely forgotten about. It cut a straight line horizontally across his wrist, just below where his hand began. If it weren’t for the way the light caught on the scar tissue, it could almost have passed for a mere wrinkle in the skin. He didn’t answer. You shifted, but not to pull away: you pulled yourself up higher onto your knees so you could press your lips to this scar. “Loki, what is this? What happened here? Did you—?”

You cut yourself off before you could finish your question, but he knew what you were thinking. Did he do this to himself? Did he try to open his veins to bleed the life out of his body? He pulled his arm away from you and closed his book so he could reach out to cup your cheeks in his hands and make you look at him. But then he hesitated.

Because there had been times where he’d considered it. In the depths of his misery, when the Titan had left him burning and bleeding and begging for death, he’d thought about trying to chew himself open to make it all end for good. There had been a time, once, in his adolescence, before he learned of his true origins, where the loneliness and the confusion and the emptiness made him treasure the idea of death. 

But he never did it. For one reason or another, the lure of death had never quite convinced him to hurt himself. It was hard to know exactly why. It was hard to put it into words, even for you, who loved him and held him and offered him warmth and affection that he’d never known. But in all the darkest moments of his life, the worry that he would fail kept him from trying. He didn’t want Thor to know what he’d tried to do. He didn’t want Thanos to know. 

He brushed his thumbs along your cheekbones and gazed at you intensely. “I did _not_ , darling. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Put those thoughts away and don’t let them trouble you further. I am here with you, and nothing can change that.” 

You closed your fingers around his wrist again, but did not try to pull his hand away from your face. Instead, you pressed a bit closer, a bit more firmly into his touch. “It looks intentional.” Your voice was so quiet. So nervous. It made his chest hurt to hear it. “Can you tell me what it is? You don’t have to.”

And, with a flash, he remembered. He remembered the shackles and the chains and the seething impotent rage. You’d never understand, but then you’d also get the wrong idea if he declined to tell you anything. He drew in a steadying breath and reached down to tug you up onto the couch, onto his lap. You allowed it, and readjusted yourself so that you were sitting a little more solidly against him. You tightened your knees around his hips and a familiar rush of desire flooded through him. You soft thing. You precious thing. Could you ever possibly know what you did to him?

“When I was younger, I had a bit of a temper.” He kept his voice light in hopes of making you laugh with such an obvious understatement, but you just kept looking at him with those big, worried eyes. He sighed. “I had a fit and I went to one of our allied realms and I stirred the pot there. I attempted to incite a rebellion. I nearly got people killed—scores of people. A nation of people. As punishment, I was imprisoned. I was shackled. I...did not appreciate the shackles. I struggled against them for a long time before they finally set me free.” At this point in his long, long life, that situation felt far enough away that it was easy for him to laugh at his younger self, but you did not join him. Instead, you pressed your fingers against the scar and scowled down at his hand. 

“It’s not funny,” you said in a low but heated voice. “They chained you up? That’s not...that’s _evil_ , Loki.” 

Perhaps he felt a quick stab of regret, then, at having told you the truth, but he pushed it aside by reminding himself that it would have been worse to allow you to go on imagining him doing this to himself. 

“You heard the part where I nearly got people killed, right? I was a monster, love, for a long, _long_ time.” From the stories you’d told him, it was clear that Midgardian childhoods were incredibly different from the one he’d had on Asgard. Perhaps you were imagining him as a young Earthly child, instead of who he truly was. 

“No you weren’t.” There was that trademark stubbornness, clear in your voice and in the way your brow furrowed. “Loki, you weren’t. You were so sad and so lonely and nobody cared. You weren’t a monster. You just needed things that no one in your life was giving you, and, rather than giving you _anything_ , they chained you up. That’s _heinous_.” Without looking at him, you brought his wrist up to your lips and kissed his scar repeatedly, almost meditatively. He let you.

There was so much about you that he’d never thought to expect, but this was easily one of the strangest and yet more precious to him. You didn’t know him as a child. You didn’t know him when he was younger. But every single time he revealed some sick new aspect of who he’d been, you defended him. It was like you wanted to wrap yourself around his younger self and heal him somehow, or make things better for him. He didn’t deserve it—his younger self didn’t. During moments like this one, it physically pained him to imagine how his former self would have reacted to someone like you hundreds of years ago. He wouldn’t have been kind. He wouldn’t have been in any way deserving of this fierce protectiveness you held for him. And you knew that, but you didn’t seem to care.

When you did finally meet his gaze, your eyes glittered with tears and with anger. He couldn’t take it any longer. He slipped his arms around you to pull you in closer, so he could crush you against his chest in an embrace. As he did, a sob rose up in your chest and he felt you bury your face against his neck.

Surely nobody had ever cried for him before. But there you were, sitting astride him and clutching him to your chest and just letting him hold you as you wept. He hated your tears, and he hated that they were for him, but, at the same time, they felt somehow like an honor? He sang to you in a low voice. Your name. Gentle reassurances. Quiet little nonsense songs that flickered around the edges of his memories.

It didn’t take long before the storm passed, but you stayed right there where you were. He heard you sniffle and had to stifle his fond smile. Everything you did made him want to cover your face in kisses. You reached up to comb your fingers through his hair even as you rested your head against his shoulder, and he made no attempt to hide his appreciative purr.

“I love you, Loki,” you whispered. He heard every word perfectly. “I love you, and I’ll keep you safe and loved, okay?”

And it was easy, sitting there with you in your arms and your tears drying against his skin, for him to nod slowly and agree.


End file.
